Looking Outward

As he lay with his cheek pressed against the ice-crusted pavement, the barrel of a gun pointed at the back of his head, one thought scrolled through Eric Seeley's mind: "My mother will have to come to this filthy alley to see where her son was murdered." The muggers left Seeley physically unharmed. They took his wallet and $20. But days later, when a black man--visiting Washington, D.C., from Africa--put a hand on Seeley's shoulder to ask directions, he nearly jumped out of his skin. "I had become fearful of young African-American men," he says. "I'd been robbed by three of them and couldn't help it."

Holding His Ground

Seeley, then 23, was an accountant at a prestigious consulting firm, with a view of the Potomac, planning on working his way up to a six-figure salary. "I wanted to have a fabulous car, live on the beach, and have the life," he says. But instead of fleeing to the suburbs after the mugging in 1991, he volunteered to work with at-risk kids. "I figured these are the kids who are going to mug me in 3 years if someone doesn't do something now." With them, he ventured into risky parts of Washington--far worse than where he was mugged. "But as long as I was with them, I felt invulnerable," he says. "Not because they could protect me--they were just children--but because of the work I was doing. It was almost like karma. I felt, 'I'm doing something good here. I'm going to be okay.' "

Making a Change for the Better

Offered a promotion at the consulting firm, Seeley went with his heart. He enrolled at Berkeley to earn a master's degree in social work. Now 35, he works for the city of San Francisco at a mental-health clinic. "I was threatened last month by a client who wanted to hit me in the head with a metal garbage can," he says. He earns a good salary, close to $75,000, but a fraction of what he'd be earning if he'd stayed in finance. And work means traveling to seedy neighborhoods, engaging with strung out and often mentally ill people whose behavior is beyond unpredictable. Fortified by that sense of mission, he almost feels superhuman. "I'm careful, don't get me wrong," he says. "But I do feel like something is watching over me. "I can't say what would have happened to me if I hadn't been mugged," he says. "I don't know if I always had this in me or if that incident changed me forever. . . . But that's how it happened, and here I am. And I can't envision it any other way."

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